"Because there's homes there don't in no way interfere with it's bein' a beautiful place. It don't have to have golden harps to make it worth while. There's probably rivers that are prettier than 'ourn, and there must be pink calmia, fox-gloves and sweet william, pansies, tea-bushes and a good many others that I don't happen to think of. There must be places in heaven that look like Deer Lake, Gaff Topsail, Kelligrews and Brigus. Mebbe there's places in heaven like New York, too, though from what you say it will need some changin' to be kept as a heaven city.
"I don't want you to think that I'm a gump[4] because of these ideas, but to me they've been a good deal of comfort and whenever I get to doubting at all about things over there I just recall it's a home and I settle back content."
[CHAPTER VIII]
CHRISTMAS WITH JIM'S FRIENDS
There was the calendar right before me on the wall, with figures big enough to mentally hit me and hit hard, and I should have remembered that the road of the year had turned toward Christmas. But before me was an unfinished news article that even a hungry and insistent stomach did not seem able to push to a conclusion. Beyond my desk out of the window I looked now and then down upon the hurrying throng who were making their way across City Hall Park to Brooklyn Bridge. It was the hour when you do not know whether to call it day or night. It was indescribable in another way,—it was either misting or raining. I suppose a Scotchman would have called it mist and an Irishman rain. I think that any one looking out that night would have found it hard to see in the gray view anything suggestive of Christmas. I turned from the wet view to my unfinished work only to be again interrupted.
A Western Union boy burst into my office with a telegram. It was from St. John's and I wondered as I tore it open if anything had happened to Harbor Jim. It was short and for once the operators had apparently followed the author's spelling.
come fur chrismus cant take no fur an answer no how biggest an best you or yourn hev ever seed come jim
A few days afterward a long letter came enforcing and elaborating the invitation. Jim wrote that he was already at work upon a Christmas that would eclipse anything New York had ever had. He had taken the idea out of a city paper that I had sent him a year before and had developed it and he wouldn't care to go forward with it, unless I could be there.